For many years the Navy’s annual Great Lakes cruise deployed a ship on a goodwill tour of Midwest cities to build awareness and boost recruiting. As a Navy reserve public affairs officer in Chicago in the 1980s, I was involved in promoting the cruise and generating publicity.
Having a warship at your disposal is a terrific public relations asset. The ship docked at cities along the Great Lakes to host visitors and prospective recruits. Local dignitaries turned out and some were invited to ride the ship to the next stop. Every port visit attracted lots of media coverage because it usually was the biggest event in town.
Except in Chicago. Chicago is big-league, one of the busiest local news markets in the country where slow news days are rare.
We launched a textbook publicity campaign, issuing news releases and calling news desks. Our pitch was enthusiastic: “The Navy is bringing one of our newest frigates to Chicago for a port visit and will offer tours of the ship.” The typical response was: “Just like last year, right? We may send someone if we can but an alderman just got convicted, two factories are on strike and there’s a riot on the South Side.”
At the same time the Navy was telling us that the ship was getting front-page coverage in Duluth and Sheboygan, and the captain expected similar acclaim in Chicago. We brainstormed the possibilities and concluded that the only way to get front-page coverage in Chicago would have been for the ship to fire on Canada as it passed through the St. Lawrence Seaway. We reconciled ourselves to striking out on media coverage.
Enter Greenpeace. During the 1980s Greenpeace promoted its message of peace and environmentalism with aggressive, often dangerous, maneuvers to interfere with Navy ships during training exercises and missile tests. The organization saw our Great Lakes cruise as an opportunity to stage demonstrations and get publicity by accusing the Navy of carrying nuclear weapons into the American heartland.
It was a far-fetched claim. The small ship the Navy sent into the Great Lakes was not part of the nuclear triad and would not carry nukes into the Midwest in any case. It would have been easy to point out how ridiculous the Greenpeace accusation was, but the Navy’s security policy dictated that we could neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons aboard any Navy ship. Greenpeace knew this and took advantage of it to create a bogus issue.
So now our ship’s routine goodwill visit was controversial. The Greenpeace operatives did a masterful job of alerting the news media to their plan for a mass demonstration to embarrass the Navy.
When the ship arrived at Chicago’s Navy Pier the media turned out in force. They were treated to some impressive military theater: The ship fired a gun salute as it approached with flags flying, a band was playing on the pier and local dignitaries held a welcome ceremony. Only a dozen or so Greenpeace protesters showed up and the city kept them at the entrance of the pier.
That evening’s TV newscasts featured lavish video footage of the ship’s arrival festivities and wholesome-looking sailors being welcomed to Chicago, with fleeting shots of the bedraggled Greenpeace contingent as an afterthought. It was the best media coverage we had seen in years.
The Greenpeace folks abandoned their Great Lakes cruise protests after that. We were disappointed when they stopped helping us.